journey

I was 11 when my family moved suddenly from the urban, tarmac wastelands of south London to a small village in south west Wiltshire, in the heart of the countryside. I wandered down leafy lanes in dappled sunlight, padded along footpaths through fields of corn and found myself free and at ease. I seemed to learn early, that in contrast to the metropolis, nature was heavenly.

I had the luxury of always knowing I was an artist but a BA in Fine Art in the late 70’s discouraged painting, preferring instead a lot of introspective thought. This and other strong, complicated forces drove me away from art to a London based career in fashion photography, where I could engage directly in the cultural moment and explore the world in travel.

Although working as a fashion photographer, I always studied art and the urge to look at nature couldn’t be resisted. In spare moments I’d try to get away and draw.

One day I decided to leave London. I came back to the country to explore painting. I began looking at the landscape with watercolour.

I knew this was only a beginning. There was an ocean to explore. I adored Patrick Heron who became my mentor. I began looking at his kind of abstraction. Its an art that loves the medium of paint with a world of colour and shape deployed for pure visual pleasure and I worked with the ready-to-hand medium of watercolour.

I could make these paintings ever larger and more complex but couldn’t avoid a sense of limitation and an internal imperative to keep exploring.

I created a huge portfolio of very playful digital paintings and joined with Samic Ceric of Debut Contemporary in London who guided me and sold the works in his London gallery.

I still felt uneasy about the work, feeling it lacked depth and my attention turned toward oil painting. I knew immediately this was a serious medium where all things might be possible but also that it would take years to master as a language before I could make some valid statement in it.

What is the subject of abstract painting? Patrick Heron talked of pure visual pleasure but I noted from his titles that nature was his primary inspiration, whether he knew it or not.

Whereas the sour coloured, pugilistic, impenetrable walls of a Sean Scully painting tell us all about the metropolis.

Clement Greenberg was wrong. The incontrovertible essence of paint is its allusiveness. Paint has the power to suggest something other than itself. It alludes to the known world of experience, whether the natural world or the metropolis. A Patrick Heron painting can tease us with reminiscences of gardens, flower beds, paths and plants and this allusive quality of paint is pleasurable to the human psyche. Good abstraction is the art of allusion.

I was fascinated to study the processes and substance of oil painting with the natural world lending itself as a source of stimulus for what I feel we mistakenly call abstract painting. Art that alludes to the phenomena of the wold is not abstract, its just a very subtle form of figuration.

But Patrick Heron’s pleasure in colour and form, albeit inspired by the phenomena of the natural world, no longer seems enough. I feel we’re in a moment where our lack of care for nature is at crisis point.

Joan Mitchell gives us beautiful equivalences, much more directly related to experiences of the natural world but that old, in-built “anxiety“ of the abstract expressionists lingers like a dark fragrance in her work. I want the expressionism, but not the anxiety.

I was happy to stop exhibiting to explore this train of thought. It was a time of other beautifully rich and intense experiences. I helped a friend make a garden.

I worked with an architect to design a special house in a nearby village and with that experience developed another plan to demolish and rebuild my own home with a purpose-made, painting studio. I managed the building of both projects.

Then there was covid. In the covid spring I walked across country to visit a friend. Never has the car-less, silent countryside been so radiant in a spring so profoundly voluptuous and sensuous. I made some playful Hockney joiners to try to capture the full exhilaration of the moment.

It required a new start and the evolution of new ways of working, based on direct experiences in the landscape, but I think its time to be in nature and grow my awareness of the value of the experience. I think only nature matters now and emphatically, the joy it gives, not the anxieties of the artist or their personal biography. Art needs to bring us to a love of nature and with greater force than the indirectness in much abstraction.

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